Raising money through ICO has undoubtedly revolutionize the world of start-ups and allowed small projects to get funds needed for further development in secure and quite interesting way - through special digital tokens. They take different forms and have different usage. Some of them act simply as shares of the company, other are used within the developing platform or application and other become tradeable assets that get their value mostly through market speculations.

Today we will look at TOP 10 projects that have raised the most funds through Initial Coin Offering and maybe we will find the answer on what should successful project offer.

10. Stox

A market prediction platform hyped by famous American boxer Floyd Mayweather, I guess his words worked miracle or maybe it's mostly his investment but they've raised $33,350,320.

A project that aims to finally do something about all these annoying advertisement that we get to see in today's Internet. They want to take it all from the big companies and give back to the users, so that they can decide what ads they want to see and to make sure they don't disturb the experience of using the sites.

Looks like there are a lot of user that are fed up with how advertisers behave in the Internet as they have raised $35,000,000.

8. Aeternity

Their aim to improve smart contracts, making them scalable and connected to real world data, this idea has granted them $36,960,694.

$53,069,235 for a gaming-related platform and tokens for in-game purchases? Seems unbelievable, but this market is indeed huge.

As we've seen so far, it's hard to pick one characteristic feature a successfully funded project needs to have, they come with different approaches and operate in different fields. They all have one thing in common, lot's of money gathered through revolutionary method that is Initial Coin Offering. But these sums are still small compared to TOP 3 ICOs at this list…

TenX basically aims to make cryptocurrencies go mainstream. They want to create apps and physical cards that will be connected to digital wallets but able to be spent in normal, as for now, fiat-ruled world. This idea has managed to raised them $64,000,000.

''A browser, messenger, and gateway to a decentralized world.'' One app that combines everything a person needs in a decentralized crypto world. Seems like projects that combine mainstream usage and crypto blockchain technology are doing pretty good in fund raising, as Status managed to get an enormous amount of $90,000,000.

One would think that ninety-million dollars is the top of the top, when it comes to fund that could be possibly raised through ICO and it's probably hard to imagine that now when we came to our TOP 3 we will see projects that have easily beaten the mark of $100,000,000 being raised.

A project that improves and introduces more features for smart contracts. We've already got this idea on our list. Maybe that's a field that needs to be explored as there are a lot of investors that believe in such improvements for smart contracts technology. Bancor indeed has the plan for this and are deploying their own ''Smart Tokens'', which happened to be a highly demanded asset as their ICO, which ended on 12th of June, 2017, has gathered $153,000,000.

2. The DAO

It wasn't a conventional ICO distribution, they weren't selling or promoting any particular product, they were in a way selling the ownership of themselves. They aim to provide a business model for decentralized companies. This at the time set a record for the largest crowdfunding campaign in the history with $168,000,000. ICO phase ended on 28th of May, 2016. After that they've come through a lot of problems and fuss, and the vulnerability that has been exploited in their code has in the end led to a fork. Pretty wild story, that could alone take another huge article. But we can learn from them in a matter of raising money, that huge userbase is very essential.

And finally, our number one ICO that in the history of all projects raising money with this method so far, has managed to raise the most money and will probably be unbeatable for at least some time, because the sum is really tremendous.

It's ICO ended on 13th of July, 2017 and set a new record for the most money that has been raised through Initial Coin Offering, and maybe one of the largest crowdfunded projects in general (for sure in a crypto world). They also have the most common feature of other successful projects on this list - aim to improve the aspect of blockchain and smart contracts usage. They've created a better version of blockchain that actually governs itself and has the ability to issue smart contracts.

They also show that you don't need to spend a lot of money for huge marketing campaigns or beautiful designs of the site or other papers and promotional material. The interesting technology can alone defend itself and gather a lot of investors that are able to see endless possibilities.

It's hard to come up with one recipe for a successful ICO that will be able to gather a lot of people willing to invest their money. There were projects from all different fields that take on different problems. But for sure we can see that the blockchain technology is still developing and are yet to be fully developed, therefore all the projects that work solely on technological improvement yet don't offer any interesting platforms or features, are still really valuable for investors as there are a lot of things that can later be built upon them and they create new possibilities of mainstream usages and services to profit from.